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This is because, according to the email, it has become common knowledge that staff have not been undertaking proper checks to see whether patients are entitled to free care.

The hospital proposes to introduce checks which would involve patients being made to produce a passport, or other photo ID, and a utility bill before being offered free treatment.

Better late than never, I suppose. Yet this problem has been known about for years.

ALAMY

Homerton hospital never recovered a penny of the money

In 2013 Joseph Meirion Thomas, a former cancer specialist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, went public with his concerns about health tourists using the NHS.

This problem has been known about for years

There was also the case of Bimbo Ayelabola, a Nigerian who travelled to Britain on a visitor’s visa while pregnant in 2010 and ended up having quintuplets, involving a £145,000 caesarean, at the Homerton Hospital in east London.

The hospital never recovered a penny of the money, even though Ayelabola wasn’t exactly the poorest resident of Nigeria – her husband is reported to be chief executive of a logistics company.

You would have to be hard-hearted not to be pleased that Ayelabola managed to give birth to five healthy children.

And I don’t blame her for wanting to give birth in Britain (where the infant mortality rate is four per 1,000 live births) rather than in Nigeria (where it is 69 per 1,000 live births).

But it is obvious that once word gets around of how easy it is to get free treatment on the NHS, a trickle of health tourists will quickly turn into an unaffordable flood.

GETTY

NHS will now make patients produce a passport, or other photo ID, and a utility bill

The NHS already struggles to muster the resources to deal with 60 million patients, without adding 170 million Nigerians to the list of people it is expected to treat.

We should do whatever we can to help improve the survival rate of mothers and children in the developing world. But offering mothers from all over the globe the chance to give birth for free in London hospitals is not a sustainable way of offering that help.

Why can’t we use part of our vast aid budget – much of which is frittered on things such as sponsoring a girl band in Ethiopia and building crab fisheries in Zanzibar – on building a maternity hospital in Nigeria?

The Government’s response to the problem of health tourism has been pathetic. It produced a figure claiming that the NHS was losing a relatively small £200million a year.

But that was just the health tourists for which the Government has documentary evidence – many are never asked to prove their eligibility and so don’t show up in the statistics.

GETTY

Meiron Thomas estimates health tourism is costing the British taxpayer £3billion a year

Based on anecdotal reports he received after going public with his concerns, Meirion Thomas made his own estimate that health tourism is costing the British taxpayer £3billion a year.

Last year he left his job at the Royal Marsden – forced out, he claims, as a result of official anger at his remarks on this and other aspects of the NHS. It isn’t just a case of foreign patients travelling to Britain for free treatment.

The European Health Insurance Card scheme (EHIC) – which allows citizens of one European country to claim free or reducedrate healthcare in other countries – is also being abused.

A Hungarian journalist managed to obtain a British EHIC after being in Britain for just one day. That meant she could claim medical treatment in Hungary – where she lives and pays her taxes – paid for by the NHS.

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Many European citizens have an incentive to get hold of a British EHIC card because their own health systems require them to make a financial contribution for every treatment.

Health tourism could be stopped if only we did what other European countries do – and introduced a rigorous system of ID checks before handing out EHIC cards or offering free treatment.

It would be immoral to turn away women in labour or anyone else who requires emergency treatment. But surely it isn’t too much to ask to make sure that anyone boarding a plane to Britain from outside the EHIC area has adequate health insurance. The NHS is rightly celebrated for the huge contribution it has made to improving health and social conditions in the past 70 years.

But it is doomed unless greater effort is made to ensure that free treatment is limited to those who are eligible for it. Sadly, there are many on the Left who cannot see this.

They either have no head for figures or they deliberately blind themselves to the impossibility that an NHS funded by 60 million taxpayers can afford to treat for free the world’s population of seven billion.

Those who try to dismiss health tourism as a serious problem for British hospitals and surgeries tend to like to think of themselves as great friends of the NHS. They are not. They are its worst enemies.